


Little Boxes All the Same

by werewolfwords



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Drug Use, It's Medicinal!, M/M, Marijuana, Sometimes It's Not Medicinal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-12
Updated: 2019-01-10
Packaged: 2019-04-22 03:22:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14299692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/werewolfwords/pseuds/werewolfwords
Summary: In which Hermann smokes pot and Newt kind of likes it. Set during and shortly after the first movie.





	1. Cancelling the Apocalypse

“Dude. What’s that smell?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Newton,” Hermann responded dryly, sitting on the edge of his bed. After a long day, Hermann was looking forward to spending at least a few hours lying in silence. Between the clanging of the Shatterdome’s ductwork and Newt’s incessant nattering, Hermann was ready to be horizontal.

“I don’t smell anything except ammonia and your particular… Musk.” Hermann grimaced. “It’s been a long day. Perhaps instead of barging, uninvited I would add, into my quarters, you should shower.”

“Uh, rude. I got you a sandwich,” Newt carped. “It’s ham. I think.”

Newt squinted uncertainly at the two shrink-wrapped, partially crushed sandwiches in his hands before lobbing one of them at Hermann. Hermann made no effort to catch it. Instead, the sandwich hit him in square in the chest and flopped into his lap.

Hermann gave Newt a sour look, keeping eye contact as he delicately unwrapped the sandwich and took a bite. He relaxed his posture a little, the curvature of his spine resting on the metal wall behind him.

Newt sat down on the floor with his legs splayed out, back to the opposite wall. Hermann’s quarters were so small that Newt’s outstretched feet touched Hermann’s bed.

“No, there’s definitely a smell,” Newt insisted, sniffing the air inquisitively. He took a large bite of his own sandwich.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Hermann scolded, his face briefly twisting in disgust. Newt, bristled.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Newt echoed in a mocking tone, flapping his hand like a jaw. His voice began to rise in both pitch and volume. “I brought you a sandwich at two in the fucking morning after working for twelve hours straight but you just have to be a dick about it. Just like with everything else.”

Hermann’s face began to grow red and hot, his mouth forming a tight, angry line.

“I didn’t ask you to!” Hermann spat. “I didn’t ask you to do anything!” He dropped his sandwich back into his lap and reached for his cane, although he remained seated.

Newt, on the other hand, sprang to his feet, gesticulating wildly, waving his own sandwich around like he’d forgotten it was in his hand to begin with.

“It’s called being a nice person! I did a nice thing, Hermann. I did a nice thing for you!”

 “I didn’t ask you to come into my quarters. My private quarters. This is my space, Newton. My sanctum sanctorum.”

“Seriously, your ‘sanctum sanctorum’? What are you, Superman? Like this closet in the basement of the Shatterdome is the Fortress of fucking Solitude or something…”

“…I should file a complaint!”

“Oh. Oh yeah, a complaint? A complaint! I’m sure that’ll fix everything! You…”

Newt swept his arm, knocking everything on Hermann’s bedside table onto the ground. There was the sound of breaking glass. The air in the room changed instantly.

“Oh. Oh shit. Hermann, I’m sorry, I didn’t… Did I break your glasses?” Newt dropped to the ground and began groping blindly under Hermann’s bed. “You need those to see. It’s not like getting a new pair is easy these days. I mean we get dental and vision, but the Shatterdome eye doctor only has those shitty looking plastic ones…” Newt babbled.

 “Really Newton, I just use them for reading,” Hermann interjected. He still felt tense, but his anger had mostly bled away. From his vantage point on the bed, he could only see Newt’s legs and bottom. The scene was a little comical, Hermann had to admit to himself. He let go of his cane again, resting it back against his bed.

“OK. I think I found your glasses. They look OK.”

Newt came out from under the bed and settled into a low crouch. He squinted, inspecting Hermann’s glasses for signs of damage. Satisfied, he quickly licking each lens, wiping them off on his t-shirt. Hermann’s eyes went impossibly wide.

“Newton, that’s disgusting!”

Newt seemed unperturbed, if somewhat confused. He placed Hermann’s glasses next to his sandwich on the bedside table before diving back under the bed.

“Relax, I just cleaned them for you. If your glasses aren’t broken what was that sound, though? Something definitely sounded like breaking glass…” Newt sounded a little muffled through Hermann’s mattress.

Newt’s body stiffened suddenly. He crawled back out from under Hermann’s bed holding a small wooden box with a broken-off glass tube sticking out of one end.

“Hermann, what is this?”

 “What does it look like, Newton?” Hermann asked, gritting his teeth.

“It looks like a vape, dude,” Newt replied quietly. His eyes narrowed. “wait…”

Newt shouted victoriously, waving the vaporizer in front of Hermann’s face like a detective who had, after a long and grueling investigation, finally found the crucial murder weapon.

“I knew it I knew I smelled something! It smells like a freshman dorm room in here, dude. I thought the wildest thing you’d ever done was maybe jaywalk. And that’s a big maybe. But the whole time you were in here, getting blazed.”

Newt pressed the vaporizer into Hermann’s outstretched hand, picked his sandwich back up from the bedside table, and took a bite. He looked eminently satisfied. Hermann hated it.

“I do not ‘get blazed,’” Hermann said, making quotation marks with his fingers. He lowered his hands and  removed the broken off glass tube, tossing it into a nearby waste basket. Hermann sniffed. “If you must know, cannabis helps with spasticity. And pain.”

Hermann slid the drawer of his nightstand open. He rifled around for a few moments before finding a small metal box. Hermann opened the box and procured another glass tube. He then returned the metal box to the drawer and unceremoniously slid the drawer shut. Finally, he inserted the glass tube into a small aperture in the vaporizer.

“I only have a few more of these. If it’s even possible for you, be a little more careful. I’m not actually sure where to get another one of these in Hong Kong. It’s still not strictly legal. If my calculations are correct, we are rapidly approaching the end of our world, and I simply do not have time for a trans-Pacific jaunt to Seattle.”

Hermann set the vaporizer back onto his bedside, sat back, and finished his sandwich. He paused again, setting his remaining plastic wrap on the bedside table.

“You didn’t break my glasses. Although I may need to set them aflame to disinfect them. Did you have to put them in your mouth? Aren’t you a biologist? It’s downright unsanitary.”

Newt had too much of his sandwich in his mouth to answer immediately. He shrugged.

“Well, you can’t run them through my autoclave. Pretty sure they’d melt,” Newt managed, after a gulp.

There was another silence, punctuated by the sound of Newt chewing and swallowing.   
  


"Well," Hermann asked expectantly. 

"Well, what?" Newt asked. He had finished his sandwich and balled up the plastic wrap. He took a shot at Hermann's wastebasket and missed. 

"Aren't you going to ask me to get you high?" Hermann needled, raising his eyebrows expectantly. 

"Nah," Newt shrugged. 

Hermann looked mildly shocked. 

"Hey man, it's not like weed is some big mystery. I smoked a lot in grad school. It makes ice cream taste awesome. But it also makes me feel like I've got too many cotton balls stuffed into my skull cavity. And we've got shit to do. Averting-the-apocalypse level shit. I mean, we're pretty much all that's left of K-science. Gotta be sharp."

Newt sprang to his feet. "Alright! You ate. I ate. Time to get some sleep. Science to be done," he declared, stretching his arms wide. Yamarashi's nose peeked out from one of Newt's sleeves. 

Hermann slumped back and closed his eyes. He let out a long breath. 

"Are you finally going to leave me in peace?" Hermann growled.  

 Newt paused in the door frame. 

"Yeah. Just. One more thing."

Hermann opened his eyes. 

"Well, what is it? Out with it, man!" 

"I'll see you tomorrow, right?"

Newt's voice was unusually soft. 

Hermann knit his eyebrows together in confusion. 

"Yes. Of course. Where else would I be?" 

Newt gave a half smile. 

"G'night, Hermann."

Considerately, Newt flicked the light off on his way out. 

 


	2. The Apocalypse is Cancelled

The past 24 hours still didn’t feel real yet. Newt had nearly died. Repeatedly. Newt had nearly stroked out drifting with a damaged kaiju brain, using a Pons headset he’d made from garbage. Newt had nearly been mutilated, at minimum, the moment a hulking gangster named after a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn stuck a switchblade up his nose. Newt could have been trampled to death by panicking crowds as Otachi struck Hong Kong. Newt could have been eaten alive by Otachi. Hermann could still feel Newt’s shivering terror and awe, watching her strange tongue unfurl like some ethereal, toxic flower blooming in the night.

Each near miss had been increasingly improbable. Statistically speaking, Newt should be dead. Hermann should be dead. Everyone in the vicinity should be dead. Any reasonable model of recent events would have produced that outcome with near certainty. Hermann sometimes forgot that improbable and impossible were not the same. He would never make that mistake again.

Instead of being dead a dozen times over, Hermann and Newt were alone, sitting on the roof of the last Shatterdome with their legs dangling over the edge, staring out over the Pacific Ocean. The sea was calm. In the distance, they could see the twinkling lights of Hong Kong. The fireworks had ended hours ago, but the acrid odor of exploded fireworks clung to everything. 

“Can I…?” Newt asked hesitantly. 

In the ghostly wake of the drift, Hermann understood instantly. He carefully moved closer to Newt, so their legs touched. He wound is arm around Newt’s soft waist. Newt turned to Hermann and buried his face in Hermann’s ridiculously large army surplus coat. Ordinarily, Hermann would complain about Newt getting disgusting fluids all over his clothes. Well. That wasn’t quite true. Ordinarily, no one touched Hermann at all. Especially not like this.

Newt began to sob. Hermann was surprised that when Newt cried, it was nearly silent. Every other sound Newt made seemed to be dialed up to eleven. Hermann moved his arm to rub slow circles into Newt’s back. 

“They’re gone,” Newt whispered wetly, a trail of still bloody-flecked mucus between his nose and Hermann’s sweater. “They’re gone and they’re never coming back. We saved the world. We drifted with a kaiju. We had to, or Raleigh and Mako would never have been able to close the breach. And that was you. And that was me.”

Newt paused and tried to give the best shit-eating grin he could manage under the circumstances. 

“Well. Technically more me.”

Hermann looked momentarily shocked, before they both started laughing uncontrollably, joyfully, tears still streaming down Newt’s reddened face. Newt always seemed to have a joke for every circumstance, no matter how dire. When their laughter finally began to ebb, Newt sat up and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his leather jacket. 

Hermann fished a hand-rolled joint and a lighter from one of his coat’s many pockets with his free hand and offered them to Newt. Hermann felt oddly shy about the gesture. He’d actually never smoked in front of anyone else before. 

Newt eyes the joint for a moment. 

“Hermann! That’s… Shocking inefficient, dude.”

Hermann smiled awkwardly but with utter sincerity. 

“Well, we are celebrating. And I like the taste of the smoke. I used to do it this way before the war.” 

Newt put the joint in his mouth and clicked the lighter. Nothing came out. He tries a few more times, frustration building. 

“Here, let me,” Hermann offered, holding the lighter in his thin, elegant fingers. He lit the joint with practiced ease. 

Newt inhaled and immediately doubled over in a rough, cough. He passed the joint to Hermann before he managed to stop hacking. 

“Sorry, sorry, this is embarrassing. It’s been a while.”

Herman smiled fondly at Newt. “I believe is the most you have ever apologized to me about anything since the first time we met.”

Hermann took his own hit effortlessly before passing the joint back to Newt.

“I used to be able to do tricks. Smoke rings and shit,” Newt reminisced, before taking another hit. The second time was a little easier. He tried to make a smoke ring.  
“Yeah, I think that came out as more of a smoke jelly bean,” Newt admitted. Hermann laughed again as Newt passed the joint back. 

Bizarrely, Hermann felt the most relaxed he had ever felt in his entire life. Of course, his leg still hurt. But he felt relaxed about that as well. After the terror of conceiving of himself in the grotesque body of a kaiju, instead of distracting him, it made him feel grounded. The pain reminded Hermann that he was human. He took two more hits and slowly felt the painful spasms of his palsy subside. He expertly flicked the ash from the joint into the ocean. 

“I think I might maybe have had a bit too much,” Newt giggled, leaning his head on Hermann’s shoulder. “Feel like I’m floating. S’nice.” 

Newt then did something Hermann never would have expected: Newt leaned up and kissed Hermann wetly on the cheek. 

“I love you. You know that right?” Newt murmured. 

Hermann felt red warmth in his ears before it spread across his cheeks. 

“Oh.” Hermann brushed his fingertips over the place that Newt had kissed him.  
“I… I’ve never been good with... With discussions of this sort. I…”

Newt interrupted Hermann. “It’s OK, man. You don’t have to say it. I saw it in the drift.”

Hermann flicked the remaining tip of the joint of the edge of the Shatterdome and into the sea. The sky was pink with dawn as the sun began to peek over the lip of the Earth.


	3. After Uprising

Hermann woke up cold and alone, striped yellow with streetlights filtering through the open window. This was not an unusual occurrence. Some nights, he would throw an arm over his face melodramatically or throw a pillow toward Newt's silhouette, beg him to just come back to bed. Not tonight, though. There was something about the way Newt sat in the open window that made Hermann reach for his cane. He dragged the many blankets off the bed with him, a sort of make-shift cloak around the cold. Snowflakes drifted into the bedroom. 

"Newt! Newt, what are you doing. You'll freeze to death," Hermann groused, throwing half the blankets over Newt's naked shoulders and pulling him close as he pulled the window closed. Hermann didn't know how long Newt had been standing there. 

Newt didn't look at Hermann. He didn't even seem to register anything had changed. He kept staring between his fingers, splayed outwards over the cars below. 

"Too many fingers... Or not enough?" Newt asked, his eyes glassy. Hermann pulled Newt closer. 

"Snap out of it, man! You know bloody well how many fingers you're supposed to have." Hermann sniffled, his nose running in the cold air. He felt the dry, hot whoosh of air as the apartment's heater kicked into overdrive. 

"Of course, of course I know how many fingers I'm supposed to have. What a ridiculous question, quite, quite ridiculous," Newt said too slowly, sliding into his terrible, fake British accent. Even now, in his confusion, Newt was always ready to get a jibe in. Hermann found that unusually comforting. 

"Ten fingers," Hermann reminded. "You're human and you have ten fingers. Shall we count them together?" Hermann wrapped his long, bony fingers around Newt's. For once, Newt's hands were colder than his own. 

"One, two, three..." Hermann lead, softly stroking each finger as he went, and Newt echoed a half step behind, pretending he didn't need the help. Hermann pretended not to notice. 

"...Ten." And then they were done.

"M'fingernails feel weird," Newt complained. 

"How can your fingernails feel 'weird'?" Hermann asked, a little exasperation leaking through despite his best effort to be gentle. 

"I dunno, they just do OK?" Newt snapped back. "Like they should be sharper or... Or something. I dunno." He immediately grabbed his hands away from Hermann's and shoved them between his own boxer-clad thighs. He tucked his head under Hermann's chin and Hermann wrapped his free arm around Newt while still trying to keep the blankets aloft. The short hairs tickled Hermann's neck. 

Hermann hadn't been thrilled about shaving Newt's head for the various sensors to stick more easily. He knew how vain Newt could be. Newt, on the other hand,had accepted his new haircut listlessly and without complaint, as he did seemingly all medically necessary indignities these days. Hermann had no idea what they'd done to Newt during his time in PPDC custody, but the doctors had mentioned that Newt's fingers seem to have been broken multiple times, and the fractures were mostly healed. Newt didn't want to talk about it, and Hermann didn't pry. Hermann wasn't certain he could handle knowing, anyway. He'd given the PPDC years of his life, and so much trust. 

"Let's go back to bed," Hermann encouraged. 

"I can't sleep," Newt whined, a little more lucid. It was the response Hermann had expected. 

"Try."

Newt muttered something, probably a curse, and scooped the blankets up and away from Hermann, depositing them on the bed. 

"One of these nights, you're going to trip on these blankets and hit your head and die, and then what the fuck am I gonna do?" 

Hermann rolled his eyes. "I'm sure you'll be fine."

Hermann was not, in fact, sure Newt would be fine. 

"Liar. Goddamn motherfucking smarmy frog mouthed liar!" Newt's voice verged on screeching. Hermann felt a brief flash of fear. Remembered Newt's, not not Newt's, hands around his throat. Hermann took a deep breath.

"I thought you quite liked frog mouths," Hermann said, lip quirking. "I've seen your fuzzy porn folder. Labeling it 'tax documents' was not subtle." 

Newt stilled. His eyes narrowed. 

"Dude. Did you just say 'fuzzy porn'?"

"Well. That's what it's called, isn't it?" Hermann replied, acting innocent. 

"You dirty fucker. You know it's not. You know it's not." Newt laughed so hard he was left gasping for air. And there he was. The Newt Hermann had fallen in love with years ago, whole, sharp as a drawer full of knives, and full of and joy. As if over a decade hadn't passed. For only a moment, as if there had been no Alice. 

"OK, you're right. I gotta try to get to sleep," Newt said, as there as he ever was, rifling through his bedside table until he found what he was looking for: His vape pen. 

At first, Hermann had been anxious about Newt using marijuana, or any other psychoactive substance. In initial tests, Newt's brain chemistry had been, in the words of the chief neurologist of one of the preeminent neurology department's in the world, "a hot mess." Newt also could and would go days without sleeping, which was dangerous. Newt would forget he was human, refuse food and water, and roar instead of speak. He would become confused about what year it was, why he wasn't in his apartment in Shanghai or at the Shatterdome in Hong Kong or, most terrifying of all, in the Anteverse. A brief and disastrous stint with traditional sleeping pills had Newt unconsciously accessing the dark web to buy kaiju parts. Newt's neurology team found this a "fascinating and unprecedented case study in complex sleep-related behaviors." Hermann found it terrifying. He was afraid the PPDC would come take Newt from him again. Fortunately, even in his sleep, Newt was a genius at covering his tracks. 

After burning through a few more traditional psychiatric medications, Newt's neuropsychiatrist suggested trying cannabis. It was clear from her posture that she was expecting a fight. Newt almost fell out of his chair laughing when Hermann blithely informed her of his own medical card. 

Newt lay down and took a few hits off the pen before drowsily setting it on the bedside table next to his glasses and a single somewhat used sock. 

"That was a good idea, Hermann," Newt slurred drowsily. 

Hermann got back into bed and lay stiffly next to Newt until Newt wrapped his tattooed arms around Hermann. 

"Mm. You feel nice," Newt said dreamily. "Don't worry, you don't have to say it back. I know you have a stick up your ass too big for you to say it."

Hermann opened his mouth to argue but before he could, Newt was lightly snoring beside him. 

"I love you too, you tattooed moron," Hermann said anyway, before closing his own eyes to chase sleep.


End file.
